Wit in the visual arts can be seen in two New Zealand artists of conceptual subtlety, skill and profundity. A retrospective of Barry Cleavin's prints at the Gippsland Art Gallery covers the artist's work from 1966 to 2001. It reveals a fertile visual imagination, as in the Umbrella series, in which the familiar lunette shape with arched bottom is filled by surging bats, with hand-like forms at the end of their outstretched wings.

Cleavin uses double meaning in words as well as images, and typography is often integral to the picture. An example is an image of a baby juxtaposed with soldiers, which bears the name Infant/infantry. Another is Symmetry/cemetery, in which these very words are laid over soldiers' limbs, all located neatly in a plastic grid for snap-out toys, as you might get in a cereal packet. The ironies often reflect sinister connections between innocence and institutions, between rationality and organised death. The humour is unsettling.

Len Lye (1901-1980), on the other hand, creates powerful statements with a minimum of anecdote in his films, sculpture and photography. Lye is most remembered for his direct film technique, in which he drew on the celluloid, without using a camera. When projected, the marks acquire an implicit narrative coherence. Lye's treatment of the film resembles moving print-making, in which abstract traces dance on screen, as if the composition is a protagonist that argues with the music.");document.write("

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A fine exhibition at Monash University Museum of Art contains Lye's filmic output in a loop of almost an hour. The films are united by a somatic energy that overcomes the abstraction of the motifs.

Lye described his artistic ambition as "composing with shapes". Like the music that goes with them, his films have a tribal air of drama and ritual.

All of Lye's work is evocative, suggesting a substratum in the mind - a primitive section of the cortex that Lye identified as "the old brain" - that informs the body by instinct. His work seems somehow genetically encoded with the dance-like rhythms of natural forms that sway in the wind or vibrate together.

This is especially seen in Lye's sculptures. They're kinetic pieces with powerful metaphoric dimensions, evoking the organic pulse of nature and the chaotic, unreproduceable quality of lived experience, as if reflecting the accidental within the programmed.

Two of the sculptures on display at Clayton are masterpieces in the genre. Grass is a plank with fine metal rods embedded in the surface in a gentle curve. The plank balances and oscillates, causing the tensile filaments to sway together. But because each rod has a different stiffness and receives a slightly different impulse from the moving plank, they all wave differently, overlap, separate and flux between harmony and discord. When the system comes to rest, the resolution in the flurry of rods is majestic.

Universe is a band of sheet metal stretched around in a loop of about two metres diameter. The band rolls in mighty waves and wobbles - perhaps caused by electromagnets embedded in the plinth? - as if its own energy creates the surges, the one riding unpredictably on top of the other. The chaotic peaks of movement are registered in sonic explosions, as the band strikes a hard ball, suspended directly above on an elastic cord. The clashing echoes through the band in further rhythms, producing an eerie metallic timbre like the sound of a protracted letter "r".

Theoretically, you could predict every movement, since the pulses produced by the machinery are identical each time the sculptures are switched on. But a chaotic genius enters which allegorises the ghost in the machine, the special metaphysical element of opportunity, excitement and unique occasion that Lye communicated by his term "zizz".

In turn this reflects how we, as genetically coded brain-machines, possess a multiplicity of manic reverberations - or surges of will and insight - that aren't overwritten by mechanistic determinism. There's a zizz-factor that lets you live your own thoughts, a domain of chance and volition in which thinking isn't predetermined by biochemistry.

These sculptures are more relevant today than ever. Lye's films may have dated slightly, though artists are still using Lye's techniques, just as the photogram portraits continue to have echoes in contemporary practice.

Technically and thematically, this exhibition marks a high point in 20th-century avant garde practice and will remain a high point in this year's calendar.